This experiment investigated the assumption that children's learning and retention of prose material can be differentially affected by varying discrepancy from expectation (as established by an advance organizer). It was hypothesized that a passage which differed significantly from expectation would produce heightened arousal, which should in turn…

Two studies investigated whether variations in the importance of inferences and the salience of premises within a text would affect the probability that the inference would be made. Six stories of about 500 words were used, with eight variations of each story. The target inference, and its plausibility, was constant across all versions. Inference…

In an experiment designed to explore the interaction of individual differences with question pacing in learning from written materials, 93 college students were administered aptitude tests representing verbal and memory abilities and then randomly assigned to treatments in which questions were placed after every one or four pages or were omitted…

The present series of experiments was designed to examine the factors affecting the ability of people to draw inferences from a passage of text. It was found that, using a true-false recognition test, proportion correct was higher and reaction time shorter on inferred information than on information that was actually presented. This was the case…

The question of how people learn and remember information from complex written materials is explored by means of Grime's semantic grammar of propositions and the author's analysis of the content structure of prose. This paper, presented at the 1973 Interdisciplinary Meeting on Structural Learning, first discusses such elements of the semantic…

Subjects read a passage and were questioned about the location or content of certain items in the passage. Performance was measured by monitoring response latencies and eye fixations. Apparently the locative information provides an index to the spatial distribution of sentences in the passage. (Author/RC)

The hypothesis that pragmatic inferences presented in text are taken for granted, superficially processed, and not stably or enduringly represented in memory was investigated. Stories were read which in some conditions contained information vitiating the implicational force of explicit inferences. The vitiating information was presented either…

Context-dependent metaphoric sentences of literally equivalent paraphrases were used as concluding statements for short didactic passages to investigate whether metaphors help or hinder prose comprehension. Adult participants' recall protocols indicated increased memorability for passages with metaphoric conclusions. (Author/LC)

The effect of variations in the organization of information and in contextual features upon comprehension of prose was tested using four tasks. Organization was varied to contrast hierarchical information structures and list information structures, and to test the effect of linking the structural components of the passage into a conceptual…

A general theoretical framework for studying the representation of prose in memory is presented. The framework emphasizes the relational structure of story characters as determined by major story themes and provides for empirical consideration of author-reader communication. (SW)

Paragraph recall was easier if prior information, presented as elaborations of the paragraph sentences, was precise, rather than irrelevant or imprecise. Precise information also permitted quick and efficient elaboration of new information. (Author/CP)

Memory representations of statements from a story were predicted to cluster into separate episode chunks in memory. It was shown that the recall of episode depends on the length of that episode, but not on the lengths of other episodes. The chunking idea was confirmed. (SW)

A technique was devised for constructing a text story which subjects agreed matched the dialogueless movie "The Red Balloon" in episodic structure. It relies partly on subjects judging where episodes and their components were located in the stories. Differences in content in movie and text recall are discussed. (SW)

Evaluated effects of perceived choice upon comprehension and memory of prose reading passages. Compared choice and no choice conditions with young and elderly adults and only elderly groups. Results indicated both age- and vocabulary-related deficits. However, perceived choice conditions did not produce any consistent improvement in performance.…